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Friday, September 23, 2016

Media has Trump completely wrong

Populism in the US grew out of the struggles of farmersin the 1800s against the banks & railroads. That earlymovement lives on in the form of the Grange. Later,populism revived as a progressive movement.

Being a muckracking political writer often makes me feel like a
custodian in a horse barn, constantly shoveling manure.

It’s a messy, stinky
job — but on the bright side, the stuff is plentiful, so the work is
steady.

Indeed, I’m now a certified equine excrement engineer, having developed
a narrow but important professional specialty: cleaning off the
horse stuff that careless politicos and sloppy media types keep dumping on the
word “populist.”

As you might imagine, in this year of global turmoil, I’ve been
especially busy. Populism — a luminous term denoting both an uplifting doctrine
of egalitarianism and a political-economic-cultural movement with deep roots in
America’s progressive history — has been routinely sullied throughout 2016 by
elites misusing it as synonym for ignorance and bigotry:

When right-wing, anti-Muslim mobs in a few European nations
literally went to their national borders to block desperate Syrian war refugees
from getting safe passing into Europe, most mainline media labeled the
boisterous reactionaries “populists.”

Flummoxed elites in Great Britain, frantic over Brexit, blindly
blamed their people’s vote to exit the European Union on the “populist” bigotry
of working-class Brits.

When in the United States, the unreal reality show “The Donald”
spooked representatives of the corporate and political
establishment, which denied that Trump harnessed public fury toward them,
smugly attributed his rise solely to “populist” bumpkins who embraced his
demeaning attacks on women, Mexicans, Muslims, union members, immigrants,
people with disabilities and veterans, among others.

Indeed, the power elites
sneeringly branded Trump himself a “populist.”

Excuse me, but if that bilious billionaire blowhard is a populist,
then I’m a contender in his Miss Universe contest.

Populism is not a style — and this is important to note
in this moment of “The Donald” — nor is it a synonym for “popular
outrage.” Populism is a historically grounded political doctrine that supports
ordinary folks in their ongoing democratic struggle for power over their lives.

This past June, I was pleasantly surprised that out of the blue a
major player in this year’s presidential race gave me a big helping hand in
cleaning the manure off the democratic ideal of genuine populism.

“I’m not
prepared to concede the notion that some of the rhetoric that’s been popping up
is populist,” said my fellow scrubber. He added that a politico doesn’t
“suddenly become a populist” by denigrating people of other races, cultures,
religions and nations.

“That’s not the measure of populism. That’s nativism or xenophobia
or worse. Or it’s just cynicism. So I would just advise everybody to be careful
about suddenly attributing to whoever pops up at a time of economic anxiety the
label that they’re a ‘populist.’ Where have they been? Have they been on the
front lines for working people? Have they been [laboring] to open up
opportunity for more people?”

You tell ’em, Bernie! But wait. That wasn’t Sanders. It was
Barack Obama delivering an impromptu tutorial on populist doctrine at
a June 29 press conference.

Granted, Obama himself has hardly been a practicing populist. But
he was nonetheless right about what populism is not.

He also noted that real
populists embrace the inclusive democratic values of egalitarianism and
pluralism, which are presently under a ferocious assault by a horde of faux
populists led by Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz, and other foam-at-the-mouth immigrant
bashers.

While the incitement of anti-immigrant prejudice for political
gain is shameful and socially explosive, it is certainly not new or uncommon in
our country.

Nor is it unbeatable. For more than two centuries, the U.S. has
experienced periodic eruptions of such ugliness from within our body politic,
yet generations of Americans have successfully overcome the xenophobic furies
of their times by countering the bigotry with our society’s prevailing ethic
that all people are created equal. And after all, almost all of our
families came from somewhere else.

Thought for the day

“To be clear: For a candidate to say he is ‘waiting for God to speak’ viz election results is to say he is waiting for God to anoint him the rightful victor. It is to say that there is no world in which God would will for a Democrat to win.”